Programming With Twitter API – P2PU Challenge 2

Hello everyone! I am back again with another challenge from Mozilla P2PU. I just couldn’t wait because completing the first one made me so dang excited! This post is an introductory one, meaning I will not be writing any code today. I will consider this a preparation for the real thing.

While I was getting things ready for the journey ahead, I ran around the web like a bot trying to gather all the necessary documentation and I spent a good amount of time on Twitter’s Developers page scheming through their updated APIs. Below are just a few I had to grab!

One thing you need to do before building any twitter application is to sign up for an account. It is not a strict rule but just common sense especially when you make API calls that require authentication.

I then picked up some snapshots of common API methods that were of interest to me! Take a close look – really!

I apologize for the visibility on the above photo but what it should show you is the methods you can use to access Places & Geo from Twitter. Consider an example like you looking for tweets from California or London!

The above snapshot shows you two main things: One is the Search API that will enable you to perform searches on Twitter and the second one is Streaming API which has several options for you to exploit!

I should have started with this one! It doesn’t hurt really. Often you will hear people say RESTful API and by now you might have noticed something about it: Did I just almost reveal the secret to you? I will let you go figure that out on Google or somewhere! Good luck.

One thing to note here is that understanding the Twitter API will enable you to build applications that you would otherwise just dream of! Sky is the limit, seriously, it is! So, buckle up and let us get started on this adventure together.

Before I end this post, I want to recommend a book I read once when I knew nothing about the Twitter API. One warning though: there have been some slight or maybe major changes to the APIs since the release of the book but those changes are easy to adapt to. Below is the cover of the book:

The author of that book is Kevin Makice and the last time I talked to him, he said a second edition is in the works. It should be out sooner or later – but you don’t have to wait on it. There are a lot of resources out there for you to be up and running with Twitter API.

Thank you for visiting once again and I hope to see you around as I dig deeper into this challenge and uncover the power of Twitter. Moving from just a regular user to a developer is very exciting! Let us do this, shall we?

Written By Elisha Chirchir

Elisha Chirchir is a software developer. He is also the founder of Simple Developer and co-founder of Instinctive Software Solutions. On any given day, he works on both Android and Web Development. During his 'free time', he offers training to those interested in learning how to code in php, java, python, javaScript etc. You can easily find him on StackOverflow Android chatroom or on Twitter @Eenvincible